Publication Date

• Required
• The date that appears on the book, generally in the indicia of a periodical or on the copyright page of a book. Spell out months or seasons in full, use standardized punctuation rather than the exact punctuation appearing in the book, and use the full 4 digit year. General consensus is that dates should be in the form and language of the country of origin (i.e. August 15, 1987 for US publications, but 19 Maggio 1957 for Italian publications.)
• If the indicia does not contain a publication date, the information can sometimes be obtained from the cover, distributor catalogs, publisher shipping lists or ads in other comics.
• If a published date is obtained from outside the comic itself, it should be reported in square brackets, (indicating indexer-added information that is not in the comic), and a note on the source of the data should be added to the issue Notes field. Add a question mark if the date obtained this way is uncertain.
• If part of the date is printed in the comic, but part is not, any part of the date that is not printed on the comic but is known should be put in square brackets, such as "[January] 2009.
• If the publication date is unknown, the copyright date should be reported instead, with a note in the issue Notes field. Information for dates from the U.S. Copyright Office is linked to from Copyright Records.
• For some books "Winter 1945" is the first issue of the year while for others it's the last issue (so it could be followed by either "Spring 1945" or "Spring 1946") so it should be indexed with both years to avoid ambiguity. Check carefully to determine whether "Winter 1945-1946" or "Winter 1944-1945" is appropriate. The same applies to books dated as "Holiday 1945".
• If the publishing date in the indicia is obviously wrong (e.g. if a monthly publication has the same publishing date as the previous issue), the date in the indicia should still be indexed, with the correct date in square brackets and an explanatory note in the issue Notes field.
• Many publishers of serialized periodicals use publication dates that differ from copyright and/or shipping dates. In these cases, the "official" publication date from the indicia should be the date entered in the Published Date field.
• Do not use a comma between the month (or season) and the year. Do use a comma when the day is specified between the month and the year (but not when the day is specified before the month)
• Examples:

* 1945
* January 1945
* January 7, 1945
* 7 Gennaio 1945
* Late January 1945
* January-February 1945
* December 1945-January 1946
* Spring 1945
* Winter 1945-1946
* Holiday 1945-1946
* [January 1945]
* [1945]
* [January] 1945
* [circa 1910]
* [circa 1950s]
* March 9007 [March 2007]

(End of definition)

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See also On-sale Date.

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